So since just about a month after my first exposure to alternative property theories it started to bug me, I've been thinking on and off about what the alternative understandings of property have to offer. I've tried to integrate whatever I found useful from every other understanding of property, and this is pretty much what I have come up with. You will probably find aspects of geolibertarianism, possession and use, and Locke's Proviso included if you are a thoughtful reader.

To start, ownership of something has two major aspects that need to be handled differently. First is the right of property, which is created by labor's improvements, which nobody else can have any right to but yourself, second is the right of possession, the right of possessing the physical thing.

The sand castle is an illustrative example that I frequently use in discussing property. On an unowned beach, you make a sand castle. You possess the sand, because you are using it in the castle. You own the castle, the product of your labor. If another person comes along and destroys your castle, you are rightly upset with them for having done so. If the tide comes in and destroys your castle, it's not a big deal. In either case, your ownership of the castle is lost in this act of destruction.

It is a common error (I believe) to say that what is owned is the physical object that labor has improved. If that were the case, then one who built a sand castle would forever thereafter until death, trade, or gift, own the sand the constituted that castle. What right do they still have to that sand when it is nothing more than an ever-flattening bellcurve lump under the waves? What does it even mean to own that?

I'd like to also discuss exclusion at this point. Traditionally exclusion is often thought of as the right that makes property what it is. With the dual aspect understanding of property and possession that I am putting forward, I don't believe that this is the case, even thought exclusion can still be justified.

Labor creates property, and if property is imagined as a responsibility for the product of labor, to preserve the value created by labor and maximize the enjoyment and benefit it provides to people, then it takes on a very different dynamic than it does as it is conventionally understood (i.e. right to exclude). It should be fairly obvious that whoever labored to create that property, whoever endured the costs in toil and time and and effort to create that property, should be the one responsible for that creation.

Property is very often created in a tangible thing. The property in this case consists of two things, the improvements made, and the physical material improved. Depriving the laborer of their labor's improvements can be done by taking the physical material improved, but this is injustice, not because the physical material was taken, but because the improvements were taken with it. Here we get to the next major point: Property is not rivalrous, possession is rivalrous.

The rivalry of physical material, in other words the rivalry of possession, is why we have a right to exclude. If you build a chair, and somebody else was able to copy your chair and leave you no worse off without going through any real effort to do so, then you have no cause of action against them. It is because they would more often take possession of the chair from you, and in so doing take your improvements to make the wood or metal or plastic into a chair, that we see property as rivalrous and view it as a right to exclude.

In truth, I view property as a right of the owner not to be excluded from, not as a right of the owner to exclude others.

Suppose your chickens are being terrorized by local foxes and raccoons that come and kill them and then run away with the bodies. You want to prevent this, and you see one such animal fleeing into my fallow field adjacent to your chicken coop. You take a rifle and go out in search of the predator, and I find you in my field.

On what basis do I have a right to tell you that you cannot be there? In what way does your presence on that field destroy or impair my labor's product? It doesn't. Do you have a right to be there? Technically no, but do I have a right to exclude you? Technically no. Are you wrong in being in my fallow field chasing foxes? Not at all, nobody is being wronged.

In other words, so long as your use of my property is not mutually exclusive with my own use for that property, you may do whatever you like with that property. I do not have a right to exclude you; however, you certainly do not have any right to exclude me either.

With property understood as a right not to be excluded from, rather than as a right to exclude others, we can also get a model of collective property, which could not have been created by one person alone. An example I find illustrative is that of villagers traveling to a local river or stream to get water, and in so doing wearing down a path between the village and the river that is clear and easy to pass through. Suppose someone then sets up a toll booth along the route for one cup of water for allowed passage. Is this just or not? If property is a right against exclusion, it is clearly not. If property is a right to exclude others from what nobody else has claimed as their own property, then it might actually be just. Arguments of the form that "No two people can have 100% ownership of something at the same time, as it would imply a right of each to exclude the other", are inapplicable to property as a right not to be excluded from, rather than as a right to exclude. No one person in the village may exclude another from the path to the stream, and under property-as-exclusion, this could be seen as there being no owner. Under property-as-nonexclusion, they can all be the owners by having rights against being excluded from the path.

I think this is a good point to leave off. There's a lot more to talk about, like the difference between human-created and natural wealth and how to preserve the latter without exclusion, the implications that this has for systems of justice and restitution, and how it might naturally bring workers into ownership of the means of production that they are presently excluded from, but I'd rather discuss the other issues after we've first discussed in depth this alternative approach to understanding property and hopefully either sharpened it up or identified areas that need improvement.

What do you all think?